Hacker News: gastlygem

New comment by gastlygem in "TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday"

gastlygem — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:07:51 +0000

> his name is literally Mao

The guy didn't pick the name. "Mao" is the family name he inherited from his father. In the case of Mao Zedong and Mao Wenchao, they have the same family name, but that's about it. The two people aren't even from the same province.

Please, at least learn your lessons first. It's like suspecting everyone with the family name "Manson" to be a serial killer aspirant.

New comment by gastlygem in "TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday"

gastlygem — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 01:13:28 +0000

As a native Chinese I can assure you 小红书 and 红宝书 are as close semantically to each other as the words constipation and constitution. Few would relate those two.

Even the most leftist Chinese entrepreneurs avoid having their brand names associated to politics; it's just common sense.

New comment by gastlygem in "Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)"

gastlygem — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 16:44:44 +0000

Just here to confirm. I have facetime setup at 5am in the morning with my family across the pacific. I've also started to exercise regularly. It's been 2 months and my sleep pattern is exactly like yours, and I feel exactly like you do.

New comment by gastlygem in "Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?"

gastlygem — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:35:28 +0000

In Chinese there is 树(tree)大(big)招(attract)风(wind) but it is used in a way that implies the tree is innocent and the wind is at fault.

New comment by gastlygem in "I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning"

gastlygem — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 03:15:07 +0000

Indeed, I have a feeling that I kinda understand the material I'm listening, but the vocabulary I hear doesn't automatically become my own...

New comment by gastlygem in "India plans to spend $3B on space. Can it catch up to China?"

gastlygem — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 09:40:06 +0000

According to some estimations China spends about $12B annually on space programs. Almost on par with that of NASA. [1]

$3B is a good start, and I believe India will eventually catch up, but probably not very soon.

[1]: https://payloadspace.com/china-to-invest-heavily-in-its-race...

New comment by gastlygem in "Simple exercise to eliminate gastroesophageal reflux (2022)"

gastlygem — Thu, 25 May 2023 01:55:38 +0000

Or you could put the plate on the floor and bend your upper body down from the bed. Should achieve the same result.

New comment by gastlygem in "Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study"

gastlygem — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 07:43:33 +0000

You can write the most sloppy cursive Chinese character and your phone would recognize them just fine. Together with text prediction it's quite easy to get 40 characters per minute (probably equivalent of 80wpm in English), much faster than most people writing on paper.

New comment by gastlygem in "Linux Desktop Environments System Usage"

gastlygem — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 00:59:39 +0000

X11 has been doing fine in the past few years. I have both my home and office computer running it with dual 4k displays and all appear to be swell.

I use Cinnamon as desktop because it happens to be the easiest to configure for 150% scaling. I think I've tried xfce and some others but ended up with mixed results.

New comment by gastlygem in "Curation and decentralization is better than millions of apps"

gastlygem — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 02:09:13 +0000

None of the top Chinese tech companies are state-owned. Also 2010 was before Xi Jinping. Things have changed a lot now. Now they get striked left and right by regulations. Just look at their stock price.

New comment by gastlygem in "Music for Programming"

gastlygem — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:56:04 +0000

Have you tried listening to songs in another language? I can't listen to English and Chinese songs, but Spanish songs mostly just fly over my head.

New comment by gastlygem in "Factorio 1.1 stable"

gastlygem — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 12:48:02 +0000

After a few failed attempts in the start I discovered Xterminator's series[1]. Now I just roll a similar map and try to imitate what he does.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fimGkeVVASA&list=PLwehwVVQir...

New comment by gastlygem in "The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)"

gastlygem — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 02:19:30 +0000

In Shanghai I pay $11 per month for 16GB mobile data plus a 50M broadband at home. I pay a bit more than that for the cloud VMs on which I install VPN services.

New comment by gastlygem in "Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations"

gastlygem — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 03:44:13 +0000

Yeah the international version of TikTok is already restricted here in China. Last time I tried to use it with VPN but it didn't work.

New comment by gastlygem in "Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action"

gastlygem — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 03:39:05 +0000

If it's reciprocity, then perhaps the government should state so, lest people think the US is becoming China.

New comment by gastlygem in "Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action"

gastlygem — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 03:35:56 +0000

Also "national security purposes" is exactly what the Chinese government said when they banned Facebook, Twitter, etc.

New comment by gastlygem in "WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency"

gastlygem — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 02:00:19 +0000

> Can you find me what the 8 people arrested for actually wrote?

One of the doctors saw the initial cases before they were officially confirmed. He told the news in WeChat groups to their friends who were also doctors about a SARS-like virus that's being identified and warned their doctor friends to beware. The other 7 just spreaded the message and they are also doctors. They weren't arrested though. They were warned by the police and forced to promise that they won't do it again.

The one who originally wrote the message were also later found to be infected by the virus. Here is an interview in which he told the story: https://m.mp.oeeee.com/a/BAAFRD000020200130255882.html?&laye...

New comment by gastlygem in "Go through your family's phone settings and turn on all the privacy features"

gastlygem — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 03:02:03 +0000

There was a time when I used a South Asian VPN service for YouTube, and I saw a lot of "single woman in your neighborhood" ads. I guess either that was the norm in South Asia, or that's what VPNs are for...

New comment by gastlygem in "WeChat and the Surveillance State"

gastlygem — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 09:08:46 +0000

We drink boiled water just because we like it warm. It's part of the culture. It's also one of the reasons why there are few epidemics when natural disaster strikes.

The tap water quality varies from place to place, but it's generally good enough, granted it is not as good as the first world countries such as the US or Japan or much of the Europe, but after all we are still a third world country.

We are a surveillance state and it's worth discussing and condemning in every aspect, but talking about tapped water just dilutes the topic.

New comment by gastlygem in "China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia"

gastlygem — Wed, 15 May 2019 06:07:38 +0000

Took me a few seconds to realize what you are talking about..